Scots Ready For Three-Team Dual With Titans, Celtics

SALEM, Ore.– After a week and a half off from wrestling, the McKay Wrestling team are back on the mat and ready to go for the 2016 calendar year.

However, the Royal Scots are in a little bit of a rush with practice time in a crunch due to a snow day in the Salem-Keiser School District reduced practice from three-days to two.

“It was very difficult,” said McKay Head Coach Troy Thomas on the situation. “First off, social media helped just a little bit with communication. We have a Facebook page for the wrestlers and the Twitter account set up where they can check in.

“But still that help with, especially with our kids who don’t have transportation. So when you try to tell them to work out on their own, sometimes that doesn’t get relayed all the way down to the kids.

So, working around a weird little situation, McKay made do what they had; that meant conditioning on Tuesday and working on technique on Wednesday.

“When we came in yesterday, we knew we had to ramp’d it up into it because we only had two practices before we had that dual meet,” said Thomas. “So it’s a matter of cramming weeks of practice into one practice to get ourselves back into shape.

Thomas admits that it’ll be interesting how everyone comes in with their weights since Christmas vacation throws everything into chaos. But he is anticipating McNary and West Salem to be in the same boat as they are.

“I know we’re expecting that with some of our kids, but the goal is to go out there and compete,” said Thomas. “We want to show our best effort and I believe we can do that. We might be out of conditioned right now, but we don’t lack in technique and our heart.”

The schedule of events starts at 5pm between the Scots and McNary before the Celtics take on the Titans.

Andy Rubio knows how important it is to come out and compete versus McNary however to start the three-way dual meet.

“There one of the powerhouses like Sprague and prove that we aren’t the underdogs (and) that we’re up there on top, that we can compete at their level,” he said.

McKay then takes on West Salem in a Senior Night match with seven seniors being honored before the match.

“No matter what, we’re still going to wrestle hard,” said Rubio. “We’re out there to prove a point, they’re competing at our home and we have to defend our home. The pressure is on them, they have to beat us is how we see it.”

Jeremy McDonald is a professional sports journalist in the Salem/Portland area and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalist in Oregon with B.S. degrees from Southern Oregon University in Journalism (2011) and Health/PE (2013). Got a story idea? Email him at jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com or on Twitter at @J_McDonald81!